


Change of Vector

by sixbeforelunch



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Dubious Computer Science, F/M, Flashbacks, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, POV Third Person, POV Third Person Limited, Survival, parental abandonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 16:49:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17605160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixbeforelunch/pseuds/sixbeforelunch
Summary: Will Riker wakes up alone in a dark hole with no food, no water, and a bleeding head wound. It's going to be a struggle to get home.





	Change of Vector

**Author's Note:**

> **Timeline:** Season 2, between "Time Squared" and "The Icarus Factor." Includes references to the season 7 episode "The Pegasus."
> 
> **Content notes/warnings:** Dubious computer science; Author clearly has a fav and isn't afraid to show it; Body fluids. Like, so many of them. Way more than canon ever acknowledged exist. I'm sorry. If it helps, none of it is gratuitous (I don't think), and there are no lingering descriptions.
> 
> **Author's note:** As a rule, I try not to do the bad parent story. I think there's a tendency to flatten complicated parent-child relationships into 2-dimensional abuse stories that don't do either character justice. That said, Kyle Riker left his son alone when he was fifteen, and when called on it, said (and I quote), "Please, spare me the pain of your childhood. I hung in for thirteen years. If that wasn't enough, it's just too bad." So...I'm not feeling too bad about making Kyle Riker out to be a crappy dad, is what I am saying here.

Will Riker woke up in a space so silent that he could hear the blood rushing in his ears and his heart beating in his chest.

He lay still, straining his eyes to see and his ears to hear, but there was nothing, not even the hum of an engine or the sound of wind outside to give him some idea of whether he was in space or still on Endicor. No voices, no sounds of movement, and no light. There was a smell, though, and not a good one.

Instinctively he reached for his commbadge. It wasn't there.

"Hello?" he called out.

His voice echoed back at him and it made him shiver.

"Is anyone there? Hello!"

Once the echos had died away, the silence returned. He experimentally held his hand a few centimeters from his face and saw nothing.

He started to sit, but a wave of nausea washed over him and he fell back down, noting as he did that the gravity seemed low. Maybe two thirds g. Maybe a little less. In which case, he was probably in space, or on a planet other than the one he'd started on. The gravity on Endicor was slightly higher than Earth normal.

The nausea passed. His head hurt, the back of his head most of all. He probed at it, grimacing in pain as he did. There was a wound, still weeping blood by the feel of it. He had dried blood in his hair and on his neck.

"Okay," he said, out loud, because the total darkness and silence was creeping him out. But the word just echoed around him, which was somehow worse.

"Okay," he said again, whispering this time. "What do I know?"

He knew he had been on Endicor, delivering supplies to the medical clinic run by the Federation Aid and Mercy Corp. He knew he'd beamed down, spent twenty minutes talking with the head of the clinic, mostly about security, and the tightrope walk of keeping the clinic welcoming but also safe in a city where the murder rate was estimated to be an astonishing 112.6 per 100,000 people. After that cheery conversation, which had included digressions into the truly appalling amount of rape and assault committed every day all over the city, there had been a tour of the clinic, and Riker had met someone who had offered to sell Riker his own child in exchange for a few thousand units of local currency. Riker had stepped out then, just outside the door of the clinic, to catch his breath and to think about how staring down the guns of a Romulan warbird took less guts than running a medical clinic in a place like that.

And then...

He drew a blank.

He cast around in his memories, tried to dredge something up, but it was fruitless and it just made his headache worse.

The most likely scenario was that he had been attacked, probably robbed, and hit over the head in the bargain. If he'd lost consciousness, he could easily have lost several minutes leading up to the incident along with it.

Riker frowned. He could sort out exactly what had happened later. What mattered now was figuring out where he was, and how he was going to get out of here.

His abdomen hurt, like he'd taken a punch or two to the stomach. And his mouth hurt. A split lip, and there was a metallic tang of blood. His hand hurt; he'd landed a few blows of his own. The most worrisome thing was the head injury, but since he couldn't do anything about that, he tucked the thought into a little box in the back of his mind. He tried sitting up again, more slowly this time. It wasn't pleasant, but the lower gravity helped. He swallowed once against the nausea and sat blinking in the darkness.

They'd gone down unarmed. Phasers were counter to the ethos of the FAMC, and no one had expected to be in any danger on a supply drop. Endicor's largest city was dirty and dangerous, especially for its poorest inhabitants, but it wasn't a war zone. On the balance, Riker was glad of it. If he'd been jumped from behind and pulled into a close-quarters fight, a phaser would have been no help at all, and at least this way he didn't have to worry about having accidentally put Starfleet weapons technology into the hands of some criminal.

"What's that smell?" He sniffed the air. He couldn't work out exactly what it was. Hydrogen sulfide, maybe, overlaid with the strong smell of a chlorine compound. He coughed.

He got to his feet. His legs seemed steady enough, and while his right hand was bruised, all of his fingers were in working order. Breathing didn't hurt, which meant no cracked ribs. His head throbbed with every heartbeat, and the bruises to his abdomen--well, he'd had abdominal injuries before and they made themselves known with almost every movement, but all things considered, it could have been a lot worse.

"Now, where am I?" Riker asked, again whispering to avoid the echo that only emphasized the void he'd found himself in. "And how long have I been unconscious?"

The blood in his hair was almost completely dry, and the cut on his lip had had time to stop bleeding, which suggested that it had been more than a few minutes. Probably at least an hour. Maybe more.

He took a small step forward, his hands stretched out in front of him. Then another step, and another, and another. He stretched his hands up and felt nothing.

Wherever he was, it was big, or at least not small, and empty. He called out again, trying to get a sense of the place by the echoes, but not being a bat, his echolocation skills weren't up to the task, and it wasn't helpful. Arms stretched in front of him, he walked in a straight line until after about five meters, he ran into a wall. Keeping one hand on the wall, he turned left and went until he reached a corner. Ninety degree angle, turn, and do it again. Two more left turns later, and he had the sense of a squarish space, about ten or twelve meters on each side. The walls were metal, warm to the touch. The temperature in the room was several degrees warmer than he would have liked, but not dangerously hot.

He circled the room three more times, with his hand higher or lower on the wall each time, but all he felt was smooth metal.

"Where am I?"

No one answered him.

On his hands and knees then, crawling along the floor in as orderly a search pattern as he could manage, searching for anything that would give him a clue, but the floor was just more of the same smooth metal, featureless except for the occasional scratch or dent. He felt each one carefully, thinking maybe they meant something, but they seemed to be just random scratches and dents. No clues there. When he reached the end of the search grid that he had mapped in his head, he sat down in the corner, thinking.

Empty metal box, probably in space.

Had he been taken hostage? Was he someone's prisoner? If he was, where were they?

Riker got to his feet, tipped his head back and screamed, "Are you there? Answer me! What do you want?"

He got no reply. He had a bad feeling that there was no one around to reply. And that was terrifying.

A captor could be talked to, manipulated, fought, bluffed. You had a chance against an enemy.

_How am I supposed to fight nothing?_ he thought, and sat back down.

Time passed. It was impossible to know how much. He was aware of thirst, and hunger. He searched the floor again, and then the walls, running his hands over every square centimeter of the room that he could reach, but the room remained stubbornly empty. He couldn't reach the ceiling, wherever it was. He jumped up experimentally several times, but even in the lower gravity the ceiling was too far above him to be reached. He sat down.

The _Enterprise_ would be looking for him. Captain Picard would tear the Endicor system apart trying to find him.

It was a comforting thought, but the fact remained that solar systems were big, and already he was thirsty, and hungry. Endicor II was a planet of over eight billion people, plus multiple space stations, some with populations nearing a million. Add to that the ships flying around, and it could take weeks, maybe months to sift through all of it. Riker didn't have weeks. He had, at best, three or _maybe_ four days without water, but realistically, he had less time than that. The room was warm--he'd broken a sweat just crawling around on the floor. He'd been injured, lost blood. 48 to 60 hours, realistically, before he died of dehydration.

The sensors on the _Enterprise_ were good. The people on it were the best of the best. They'd be following every lead, trying to narrow down the search field. But it would be as much luck as skill for them to find him within that time frame. 

And he was assuming he was still in the Endicor system. For all he knew, he was traveling at high warp out of the system.

Will Riker wasn't a man prone to panic, but his heart hammered in his chest as he contemplated spending days staring into the darkness with nothing to do except hope that he might be rescued in time.

"This sucks!" he announced to the empty room. The empty room echoed his words back to him as if in agreement.

Taking a deep breath, he began to walk around the room again, this time with his hand stretched out above him. When that proved fruitless, he flattened himself against the wall and jumped up as high as he could go, moving one step over each time, trying to find any sort of feature on the wall that might give him a clue or some hope of getting out.

Nothing.

He sat down again.

More time passed.

Intellectually, he'd always understood why solitary confinement and sensory deprivation were considered forms of torture, but he'd never really known until then just how bad it could be. He was perversely grateful for the pain he was in, because it was _something_ in the face of nothing.

He sang his favorite songs. He made up simple orbital mechanics problems and solved them in his head. He did a hundred push ups despite the protest from his bruised abdominal muscles. He listed his favorite musicians in alphabetical order. He did a hundred more push ups, not especially hard in the lower gravity. He sang the Federation anthem.

He fell asleep, and woke up sweaty and shaking and nauseated.

Time dragged on. And on. And on.

*

Kyle Riker wasn't a great dad. He was standoffish. He was prickly. He was impossible to please. And for the last six months, it seemed like every time he and Will were in a room together, it ended in an argument.

But Will still hadn't expected to wake up one morning to a recorded message from his father saying that he had taken a job outside of Federation space and wouldn't be back for a few years.

"You're a competent kid," Dad said. "You'll be fine without me."

Will tried to take it in stride at first. It wasn't like he needed his father to take care of him. Will had been getting himself to and from school, making his own meals, keeping the house clean, and generally parenting himself since he was nine, and Dad had decided they no longer needed either a nanny or a housekeeper.

Two days passed. Three. It was fine, everything was fine, but sometimes his stupid emotions got the better of him and he was scared. What if he wasn't as competent as Dad thought? What if he wasn't fine all alone?

At the end of a week, Will finally broke down and told his teacher what was going on. He almost immediately regretted the decision, because it turned out that when you were fifteen and your dad just up and left you, that was kind of a big deal. The police got involved. Social services. The school psychiatrist. Someone found a distant relative that Will hadn't seen since he was six months old, and they threatened to pack him off to Dubai to live with her, until she balked at the idea of taking on a teenager she didn't even know, and the psychologists decided it would be more detrimental to his mental health to be uprooted at this "difficult time".

He hated to admit it even to himself, but as far as Will was concerned, the time wasn't especially difficult. The more he thought about it, the more it was better without Dad around. There had been a lot of screaming fights between them lately. Will didn't even know what the fights were about, they just happened. One of them would nitpick something the other had said, and the next thing Will knew, they were in each other's faces again.

He was kind of enjoying the quiet.

The social worker's name was Guillermo. He was young, played parrises squares, and was generally not completely awful, although Will resented him for wandering through the house, clearly looking for evidence that Will was...what? Neglectful? Stupid?

"How long has your father been gone?"

"Ten days," Will said. Guillermo knew this, of course, but Will answered anyway. He was being cooperative. He was being mature. 

Will picked up a PADD from the desk in the living room--he'd taken over his dad's desk with him gone, it was nicer--and read it over. Dad was gone and the adults were freaking out, but Will had a chemistry test coming up, and he was not about to sabotage his perfect grades because Kyle Riker had up and left.

"And you've been taking care of yourself this entire time?"

"It's not hard," Will said. "Cook, clean, do the laundry. They serve breakfast and lunch at school, so I only have to make dinner. And it is the 24th century. It's not like I'm on the floor scrubbing the tile in the kitchen. We have machines for that."

"True," said Guillermo, sitting on the edge of Will's desk. "Still, it takes a certain amount of executive function to run a house and take care of yourself, machines of not. Minor children, as a rule, aren't expected to take on that cognitive and emotional load."

"I'm precocious, didn't they tell you?"

Guillermo laughed, which made Will's back go up, but he forced himself not to react. It was up in the air now whether he'd end up in foster care or on some sort of limited emancipation program that would let him take care of himself and live alone, albeit with oversight from social services. He was desperately hoping for the latter, which meant he had to be the most mature teenager who had ever lived, which meant not getting defensive when someone laughed at him.

"What they told me," Guillermo said, "is that you're the best student in school. Perfect grades. Advanced classes. And musical too. The trombone? Unusual choice."

Will set aside his chemistry text. "I like jazz."

"You're athletic too. Did I tell you--"

"--that you play parrises squares? Yes. We bonded. It was heartwarming."

Guillermo became serious and Will's stomach dropped. Too nonchalant. If they thought he wasn't dealing with his emotions about his dad leaving, it would count against him. He'd been doing a lot of research into what social services looked for in a situation like this.

"When do you sleep?" Guillermo asked.

"From 11PM to 7:30AM, every night." Guillermo gave him a dubious look and Will said, "Sleep is important. It's bad for your brain if you don't get enough of it."

Guillermo sighed. "You're a remarkable boy, Will. I'm told you have a lot of friends. You're very popular at school."

Will had never given much thought to his popularity. He just liked hanging out with people, liked talking to them, as long as it didn't interfere with his schoolwork. "I guess."

"Your teachers describe you as charismatic. They say you take over any room that you go into, naturally fall into a leadership role."

"I hope that's true. I want to do command track. I'm going to go to Starfleet Academy."

"Most people who say that, I try to gently prepare them for disappointment, but honestly, with you, I believe it." He paused, looked uncomfortable. "They found your father. He's on Andor."

Will chewed on the inside of his cheek. "Okay."

"He broke the law, leaving you the way he did. You can't just abandon a minor without arranging for their care."

"He's not going to go to jail or anything, right?" Will didn't like his father, but he didn't want to see the man in prison.

Guillermo shook his head. "No, nothing like that." Will was pretty sure there was an unspoken 'unfortunately' in there. "But I want you to understand that what your father did is not normal, and it wasn't right."

"I understand. Does he want to talk to me?"

Guillermo's face did a weird thing and Will couldn't read his expression, but he was pretty sure the man was pissed off. "He didn't say."

"That's fine. I don't particularly want to talk to him."

"How do you feel about all of this?"

Will ran his hands through his hair. It was getting too long. He needed to get it cut. "I don't know. Annoyed, mostly. He's screwing everything up." Will got up and paced around the room. Calm down. Don't get too upset.

"He's screwing up your plan to get into the Academy?"

"Yeah. Do you have any idea how hard that is? How few applicants actually get accepted? If he wanted to leave fine, but he couldn't hang on for three more years? He couldn't wait until I'd taken my entrance exams?" Will flopped down on the couch. "Now you think I'm some sort of sociopath who doesn't care about his own father being..." He waved a hand. "Gone."

"No." Guillermo sat down next to him. "I think you're an incredibly bright, astonishingly driven fifteen year old boy with a...complicated relationship with his father."

Will shrugged.

"Here's the deal," Guillermo said. "We're not putting you in foster care." Will relaxed. "But you also don't get to stay here. This is a big house, it's a lot for you to take care of all by yourself. I found you a small apartment. One bedroom, one bath, small kitchen. There's a replicator, and you'll be given enough credits to eat out of it every night. You can cook if you want to, but you don't have to."

Will nodded. So far, it was better than he'd expected.

"You'll meet with your psychiatrist once a week. You'll meet with me twice a week to go over any challenges you might be facing. You'll be subject to a 10PM curfew on school nights. Midnight on weekends. If you want to be out past that, if you want to go away somewhere, you need to clear it with me first. I'll try to be flexible. You can reach out to me any time of the day or night if you have a problem. If I'm not available, there will be two backups for you to try. Also a crisis hotline, should you ever need it. No ethanol, no mind-altering substances stronger than caffeine. You get caught with any, your _privilege_ of living alone will be reevaluated."

"Understood."

"No parties. You can have three people in your apartment at one time. No more, and they have to leave by 9PM. You'll be subject to random home inspections, to make sure that you're following the rules, and taking care of yourself properly, although honestly with you, that's the least of my worries."

Will looked at him. "What are you worried about? With me? Just out of curiosity." 

Guillermo stared at him so long that Will started to get uncomfortable. "Are you bothered about having to leave home?"

"No. Home is just somewhere there's a bed for you to sleep in."

"What about roots? What about a place to be completely comfortable?"

Something sharp twisted in his gut, but he said, "Roots are for trees. I'm comfortable wherever."

Guillermo sighed. "This is what worries me."

*

How long had it been? Six hours? A day?

The quiet was getting to him. It was playing tricks on his mind, dragging his thoughts to places he didn't care to revisit.

Thirst was constant now, and hunger, and also he had to pee. Eventually, the pressure in his bladder could no longer be ignored. He shifted uncomfortably and considered his options. In a metal box with no containers or absorbent surfaces, liquid would inevitably spread out across the floor.

Disgusting. 

After a moment of thought, he stripped off his uniform top, felt his way to a corner, and tossed it down. Feeling a pang of conscience at the idea of literally pissing on a Starfleet uniform, he aimed for it as best he could in the total darkness. It would at least contain the mess, if not the smell.

He laid back down and thought about what was probably going on on the _Enterprise_. Poker night would have been tonight (last night?), but poker was Riker's game, and if he didn't organize it, usually no one else bothered to. If he died here, would the poker night die with him?

" _This_ is what I'm thinking about?" Riker muttered. "I'm losing my mind." 

Except, it wasn't about poker, it was about his friends. It was about missing them, about wanting to be with them.

"I don't want to die alone," he whispered into the void, and shuddered.

He stood up and began to run though a calisthenics routine. Probably it was a bad idea given his injuries and dehydration, but doing nothing was worse. Halfway through, the ship--he'd decided that it was almost certainly a ship that he was on--lurched, and he narrowly avoided falling to the ground.

Something screeched, like metal on metal, and then there was a loud clang that made him cringe back although it seemed to be coming from every direction. 

There was another sound, again metallic, and he moved in the direction of it, ran into the wall, and started tracing the wall again.

This time where was something. Metal, flat, and with cylindrical rungs... A ladder! A ladder that was starting to retract!

He grabbed it, and held on tight as the ladder began to lift into the air and then fell back down under his weight and he heard a click. He laughed in sheer relief when it shuddered to a stop. His best guess was that the ladder was retractable, and had been shaken loose by the jolt of the ship. Not secured in the down position, it had started to retract again almost immediately. He gave an experimental jump and it stayed fixed. Probably his weight had locked it in place. If he hadn't grabbed it in time...

That was not a thought worth thinking about. He leaned his head against the rung of the ladder and let a wave of relief wash over him. A ladder was something, and after hours and hours of nothing, he would take it.

"Nowhere to go but up."

After the first few meters, he realized he wasn't going to reach the top any time soon, and started counting rungs as he went. It was hard to say how far apart they were, but it was a comfortable climb, so maybe forty centimeters. Ten rungs. Twenty. At twenty two, he looked up and saw a light. He blinked twice, not entirely sure that he could trust his eyes, but it was there: a steady, faint red light. He picked up the pace, until he was level with the light.

It was small, and electronic. He reached out and felt what could have been a control panel. Square, flat. His fingers found a button and he pushed it, then cried out as the panel came to life. After so long with no light at all, even the illumination on the screen of the control panel made him turn his head away and blink rapidly.

When his eyes had adjusted, he turned back. The light was dim, just enough to let him see his immediate surroundings, which were more or less as he had imagined them. He was on a ladder, the walls were metal. He looked down, and saw only darkness a few meters below him. He looked up and saw the same thing.

The control panel wasn't in any language that he could read, and none of the icons looked remotely familiar.

Riker looked up, debating continuing versus playing with the control panel. In the end, he went up. He could come back to the panel if he had to.

When he had gone a few meters, the control panel went off again, plunging him back into the dark. He startled, almost fell, and clung to the ladder. Even in two thirds g, the fall wouldn't be a pleasant one, not after the distance he'd traveled.

"Come on, Will. You aren't afraid of the dark," Riker said, but after keeping it mostly at bay for so long, anxiety was starting to uncurl in his stomach and wind around the base of his spine. The brief moment of light had reminded him how disconcerting the dark could be.

He kept climbing, twenty one rungs more, and reached a ceiling. One hand on the ladder, he leaned back, exploring as much of the ceiling as he could. It was just as featureless as the rest of the room, at least the part he could touch. There could be a latch just out of his reach, but in the pitch black of the room, if there was something there, he couldn't see it.

He sighed in frustration, and started the climb back down. After he had gone a rung or two the gravity suddenly cut out. It cut as he was bringing his foot down, and he fell back, managing to hold onto the ladder with one hand. He scrambled to get his other hand on the ladder, and clung to it, his heart racing in his chest. There weren't a whole lot of ways his situation could get worse, but floating in zero g with no reference points and no way to control his vector was one of them.

He let his feet off of the ladder and moved down--not that down really applied anymore--using only his hands, careful to make sure one hand always had a secure grip before moving the next. When the red light reappeared, his heart finally stopped racing. The control panel meant that this wasn't just an empty box. It implied some sort of connection to the outside.

Unfortunately, it was still in a language he didn't recognize. Keeping one hand tightly wrapped on the ladder, he tapped experimentally at various icons. The screen changed, which was encouraging, but it didn't change into anything that he could read.

He flicked the screen in annoyance, and almost lost his grip on the ladder when a vaguely humanoid figure appeared, brightly colored and animated, with flashing lights in the background. He shook his head. The language wouldn't parse. Like all Starfleet officers, he had a universal translator installed in his brain. The chip interfaced with his comm badge, hijacked the language processing center of his brain, and made it seem like the whole galaxy spoke English, while also letting them think he spoke their local language. Invaluable for undercover work, and also very creepy if you thought about it for too long, which was why Riker tried not to. Unfortunately, he didn't have his comm badge, and while the UT chip in his brain could theoretically work independently, the processing power just wasn't there to figure out a language that hadn't come pre-installed.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, refusing to either panic or despair. All things considered, he was in much better shape than he'd been fifteen minutes ago. He had a ladder now, and a computer screen. In the dim light of the control panel, he could just make out a small, faded mark below the screen. He leaned in close.

Riker smiled.

"If my eyes do not deceive me, that is a Vulcan symbol." Vulcan companies sold computer cores all over the sector, and had been doing so for centuries. A lot of people loaded their own software onto the Vulcan hardware, but they rarely bothered to wipe the original Vulcan operating system entirely.

He carefully pried the cover away from the control panel, letting it float next to him as he worked. There were a few more lights hidden behind the cover, and he could just about make out the hard reset button. He pressed it, and three seconds later, the screen went blank, and then it came back up showing the boot screen. He quickly tapped the icon at the bottom of the screen, taking him into the root menu. 

It was in Vulcan.

In theory, that was better than a language he had never even heard of, but in practice it still wasn't going to help him.

Except that the UT in his head would have Vulcan pre-loaded. It didn't work on written text, but maybe if he could get the computer talking...

"Computer?"

Nope. The computer either lacked a voice interface, or it wasn't turned on.

"Okay, where am I?" He had seen and used the standard Vulcan OS before. Everyone had. It was a four hundred year old computer system that was as stable as red dwarf star. It wasn't fancy, and it was the furthest thing in the world from cutting edge, but it was flexible and played well with other programs, as long as you knew how to work with it. If you needed a reliable computer that did exactly what you told it to do every time and was next to impossible to hack into, you couldn't do better. Even Starfleet computers used a heavily modified version as the kernel at the core of the computer systems.

He was staring at the command line. That was good. Basic commands he could do, even in Vulcan script. He brought up the keypad, and accessed the language library. He knew the command for changing the language, but he had no idea how to say 'English' in Vulcan, so he brought up the entire language index and started to scroll.

The Vulcans added three or four of the most common languages from every planet where they sold their computer cores. Assuming English was buried somewhere in the mess, that sort of obsessive attention to detail might very well save his life, but it was still a lot to go through.

He was starting to get worried that maybe this particular computer pre-dated Vulcan contact with Earth when he saw Chinese characters, almost certainly Mandarin. Not that it would help him anymore than Vulcan, but Mandarin implied other Earth languages. Spanish came up next, which he could use if he had to, but then he saw 'English' and quickly typed the command to change the language.

The screen flickered, and came back up as something he could understand. Riker grinned. "Now we're getting somewhere."

Typing quickly, he requested a status update, but all it gave him was the status of the computer itself, not the ship. The computer was online, and working perfectly, which was nice for it, but without access to ship's systems, he was no better off than he'd been five minutes ago.

But. If he exported the English language package, added a translation matrix, turned it into something that the alien system would like, and then installed that onto the alien computer system, he might be able to translate the ship's systems into English.

It was a lot of ifs, but it wasn't like he had any better ideas. 

Now that he was working in English, it went faster, but he was working at the very limits of his computer abilities, so it didn't go nearly as fast as he would like. When he'd made the changes, he restarted the system, remembering as he did so that the first quiz he had ever failed had been on computer-aided translation.

*

As a cadet, Will had just enough transporter credits to make it from San Francisco to Anchorage every week. His roommate teased him about going home all the time, but it wasn't about going home. Anchorage was just where Ningeokuluk had her office, and he'd been seeing Ningeokuluk since he was fifteen. He could have seen any therapist in the San Francisco area for free, but he was willing to spend the credits to keep seeing her. It wasn't like he was using them for much else.

"They hate me," Will said, flopping down dramatically in the armchair. He heaved a sigh and looked around. Her entire office was decorated with Inuit art, traditional and contemporary. It soothed him, being in this space.

"Who, specifically?"

"Everyone! The teachers, the other cadets. No one talks to me. The teachers go too fast. I can't keep up sometimes. There's too much work. I failed a computer science quiz yesterday. How?"

"I assume you failed it by getting a lot of the questions wrong," Ningeokuluk offered. "That's usually how it happens."

Will scrubbed at his face. "I don't fail tests. I just...I don't do that."

"Historically you haven't. Apparently now you do."

Will grunted. "Senek. He's Vulcan."

Ningeokuluk crossed her legs and smoothed out her long skirt. "Who?"

"The computer science professor. He doesn't like me."

"Are you saying that because he failed you?"

Will shrugged.

"Did you study for the quiz?"

"Some."

"Some," she repeated, unimpressed.

"I had other things to study for," he said, crossing his arms over his chest. He started to slouch down in his chair and forced himself to stop and sit up straight. Starfleet cadets didn't pout in their therapist's office. "And I understood--I _thought_ I understood everything." He fell silent, looking around at the art. It changed a lot and he liked the new pieces.

After about a minute had passed, Ningeokuluk asked, "Why do you think the other cadets don't like you?"

"They're...dismissive."

"Give me an example."

Will drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. On reflection, it was hard to find a good example. "It's just a feeling I get."

"Are they dismissive, or are they just not making you the center of attention in the way that you're used to?"

"I don't know. Maybe...I don't know." Wow, very articulate. No wonder his Starfleet History teacher had said his latest paper was stilted and lacked depth of understanding. "It's just hard. Harder than I thought it would be."

"What is?"

"Everything. The work, making friends, all of it."

Ningeokuluk nodded. "We talked about this before you left."

"Yeah."

"We talked about going somewhere where everyone is just as smart and as gifted and as driven as you are. About getting used to being average."

"Yes, but..." He trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence.

"But you thought that even at Starfleet Academy you would manage to stand out without even trying? That you would be able to handle some of the most difficult curriculum in the entire Federation with the same ease that you brought to basic Algebra?"

He scratched at his chin. He hadn't shaved, and the day's growth of stubble itched. "When you put it like that it sounds pretty stupid."

"Would you put it differently?"

"No." He sighed. "I thought going to the Academy would be like going home."

Ningeokuluk raised a single eyebrow, almost Vulcan-like. "What does home mean?"

"Comfortable." Will got up and walked to the water cooler on the far side of the room. Ningeokuluk kept water, infused with lemon. He appreciated it. Somehow his mouth always got dry during these sessions.

Ningeokuluk waited until he'd sat back down and said, "We've talked before about how you never felt entirely comfortable with your father."

Will rolled his eyes. "Can we not do daddy issues today? I'm really not in the mood."

"Fair enough. Tell me about the last time you felt like you were truly home."

He drank the entire glass of water and then sat it down on the table next to him and stared out the window. Ningeokuluk let him be silent and think.

_Never_ , he thought, but he couldn't bring himself to say that, not even to her. It was too whiny, too woe-is-me even for his present state of mind.

He said, "Last few years of school were...weird. I was the kid whose dad abandoned him. I got so many pity invitations to dinners and game nights."

"I remember."

"When I went it was...like I was some sort of alien doing an anthropological study of Human culture. It was nice, but it wasn't my world. Even before Dad left, he was...what he was."

"Neglectful," Ningeokuluk supplied.

Will shrugged. "I'm not trying to act like I had some sort of Dickensian upbringing. But Dad was cold, and at school, people liked me and I liked them, but I never quite fit. Alone in the crowd you know? Not always, but...sometimes. A lot of times."

"You were taking college-level engineering classes and studying in detail the career paths of James Kirk and Christopher Pike while everyone else was shoving snow down each other's pants. That doesn't make you better than them. I'd argue you could have done with less studying and more snow down your pants." Will grinned. She was probably right. "But it does mean you had a different set of priorities."

"I thought Starfleet Academy would be the place where everyone was like me. I thought I would fit there. And instead it's just...hard and awkward."

"Do you still want to be a Starfleet officer?"

"More than anything else in the universe." He frowned. "Are you saying that I need to stop sulking because I'm not as happy as I thought I would be and just get on with the work?"

"I'm not saying anything like that. Your happiness matters. But it's for you to decide what's most important to you. What will ultimately bring you the most satisfaction in life."

Will chewed on his lip. "What would ultimately bring me the most satisfaction?" He laughed. "Right now, it would be figuring out the underlying theory of computer translation models."

*

The screen was black. Even the comforting little red light was gone. Sweat was dripping down his face, and the dried blood on the back of his neck itched.

"Come on..."

YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO THIS SOFTWARE HAS EXPIRED. YOU ARE NOW EXPERIENCING THE FREE VERSION.

"What?"

PLEASE ENJOY THIS AD AS WE TAKE YOU TO YOUR HOME SCREEN.

The animated figure appeared again.

"White Star Station is opening soon, and now accepting applications. People of the sixth order are invited to apply for six and ten year service contracts. All usual service contract conditions apply. Join us, and start a new life on White Star Station."

"You have got to be kidding me," Riker said, not sure if he was more disconcerted by the idea of having to watch an ad to be able to access the computer, the happy dancing figure inviting people to sign a contract that condemned them to years of forced labor, or the fact that it was so old that it was advertising the opening of a space station that had been virtually abandoned for decades now.

The home screen reappeared. Riker pulled up the ship's status.

LIFE SUPPORT...PARTIALLY OFFLINE. CO2 SCRUBBERS WORKING AT 10% CAPACITY.

That was bad. Once he used up all of the oxygen, he wasn't going to get more, at least not quickly enough.

WARP DRIVE...NOT APPLICABLE

That was good. It meant he was almost certainly still in the Endicor system.

GRAVITY...NOT APPLICABLE  
INERTIAL DAMPENERS...NOT APPLICABLE  
REACTOR...STATUS UNKNOWN  
THRUSTERS...STATUS UNKNOWN  
COMMUNICATIONS...OFFLINE

He backed out, and tried to get into communications.

The stupid dancing animated figure appeared.

"Communications are only accessible from the central computer terminal. Upgrade to a paid subscription today and get comms throughout your ship!"

"This is moronic," Riker said, wishing he could go back to the Vulcan OS.

"Tired of the limitations? Upgrade to paid today!"

"Shut up. How about a map?"

That the computer would give him, after he figured out how to get to it. A schematic of the ship appeared. It looked like some sort of cargo hauler. There was a large shipping container that appeared to be capable of being detached from the command center of the ship. That was presumably where he found himself. The central computer terminal was in the core of the ship, just above the engine room. The good news was that he could get to the central part of the ship by--

Gravity came back, with a different acceleration vector than before. Riker was slammed forward into the ladder, face-first, smashing his nose in the process. The rest of him fell down onto the ladder, onto his front, stomach and hip bones and shins connecting painfully with a lower rungs of the ladder.

The pain was blinding. Gravity went away again. Riker floated, one hand still clinging to the ladder, listening to his own shaky breathing. Tears pooled in his eyes with no gravity to carry them away. He used his free hand to wipe them off. Drops of blood mingled with his tears and floated around him, barely visible in the faint light from the control panel.

It wasn't gravity he was dealing with. Not really. There was no gravity generator here. It was acceleration. He was getting knocked around when this ship changed vectors, and no one knew he was here. Or if they did, they clearly didn't have his best interests at heart. No one was going to be thinking about the maximum g-force that a human body could survive.

He had to get out of here.

The ship lurched again, pulling him down relative to the direction of the ladder, but not by much. Probably less than one-fifth g. It was enough to shake him out of his daze. He scrambled back onto the ladder, just in time. The ship lurched again, this time sending him up with a fair amount of force but, holding secure to the ladder, he didn't go flying.

A mechanical shudder ran through the container. He looked up, and could hear the sound of a hatch opening high above him.

"Hello! Hello! There's someone here!"

If anyone was up there, they didn't hear him or didn't care. Climb up, and hope that he could get someone's attention?

No. If he was right, they were going to start filling this container. With what, he had no way of knowing, but he doubted there was anyone up there to stop it. Everything about this felt automated. The control panel had gone dark again, but he had partially memorized the schematic. About a meter above him there was supposed to be an access hatch to take him to the main part of the ship. He scrambled up the ladder, running his hand along the wall until he felt a door. Working again in total darkness, he groped around until he found a handle. His fingers wrapped around something cylindrical. He pulled it, pushed it. It didn't budge. Tried to turn it, clockwise and then counter, and nothing.

Was it even the handle he was holding?

Above him, there was a mechanical whir and the sound of something wet coming through. The stench made him gag. Sewage. This ship was hauling sewage, probably from one of the eight space stations that dotted the Endicor system, serving as an escape for the rich from the planet that their selfish policies had ruined. If he didn't get out of here, he was going to drown in the waste of a bunch of oligarchs and their toadies.

After seeing the way the poor lived on Endicor, that made him really angry. 

But anger was good. Anger was motivating.

He let go of the ladder, keeping his hand on the cylindrical handle attached to the door. There was still no gravity, but the sewage was beginning to fill the container. The smell was overwhelming. He was mouth breathing anyway--breathing through his almost surely broken nose was agony--but there was no escaping it.

One hand on the handle, feet floating out behind him, he tried to get a sense of the door. About a hundred and twenty or a hundred and thirty centimeters square, the only feature was the handle he was already gripping. So why wouldn't it turn?

He twisted so that his feet were braced on the side of the ladder and pushed, then pulled.

It moved!

Both hands on the handle now, pulling with all his might, and the handle slowly gave way, a little at a time, until he finally felt a click, and the door fell open. He scrambled into the opening, just as dark as the one he was in. He turned, groping for the inner handle. Found it, and pulled the door shut behind him, latching it closed.

He floated in the little compartment, gasping like a fish. The smell had followed him. The smell was _on_ him.

_Don't throw up,_ he thought. _You'll only make it worse._ But some combination of the pain, the smell, and the adrenaline rush of nearly dying an ignominious death meant his stomach wasn't listening.

Puking in zero-g was a miserable experience. He had gone it once before, but that had been in a Starfleet training exercise. The automated systems had cleaned up the mess before it could get very far, and the worst he had had to endure was some ribbing by his fellow cadets. This was so much worse. When he was done, he was left floating in a haze of his own vomit. The thought almost made him lose it again, but he shoved that fact, along with the fact that some of what he was covered in wasn't his, but rather the sewage slurry from an unknowable number of creatures, into the little box of things that he was not thinking about.

He coughed, which hurt, and took a breath, which hurt. So much for no broken ribs. He groped around himself. He hadn't had time to properly study the schematic, but if he remembered correctly, this corridor linked the cargo container he had been in with the main body of the ship. He connected with a wall, and then with some sort of hand hold. No thrust, but that could change at any moment.

A light came on, one and then several. He cried out in pain at what seemed like blinding light, but after a few seconds his eyes adjusted and he could open them and look around.

Probably he'd activated some sort of motion sensor connected to the lights. The corridor was lit in dim yellow. It was circular, maybe a meter and a half in diameter. Hand holds ran along the top and bottom of the corridor. This ship had been designed to spend a large portion of its time in zero-g.

He grabbed one of the hand holds and pulled himself down snug against the wall. He had no idea when the acceleration vector was going to change next, and he did not want to go far if it did.

He had to keep moving, but he paused there to catch his breath. He was light-headed, dazed. His mouth tasted now like blood and bile. So many things hurt that it was hard to get a handle on all of them, but his nose was the most painful of all. He wasn't a stranger to a broken nose, or to broken bones generally, but that didn't make it hurt any less.

He was thirsty. He wanted to wash out his mouth. He wanted a large glass of water. He wanted to take the longest, most powerful shower he could, and strip off the entire top layer of his skin.

"Not yet." His voice was a harsh whisper. He looked up, down the corridor, which disappeared into darkness several meters away. "Keep going, Will. Get to the control center, get into the comms. Send a message to the _Enterprise_. Soon enough, this is just going to be a funny story you're telling at the poker table."

One hand over the other, and he pulled himself down the corridor, resting to the urge to move too quickly, just grateful for the relative ease of moving in zero-g while it lasted. The lights were definitely on a motion sensor, and lit as he went. He could faintly hear the sound of the cargo container filling. It echoed down the corridor after him.

How long did he have? That was a big container, and it was going to take a while to fill. But he hadn't exactly had time to calculate the flow rate, so there was really no way to even ballpark the timeline until...until what? Presumably once it was full, the ship would be going somewhere. Maybe back to Endicor, maybe to another planet in the system, maybe to a station somewhere.

Without a warp drive he wouldn't be leaving the system, but did that matter really? Space was unfathomably huge. It was easy to lose sight of how big a single system was when warp drive let them travel between the stars and their sensors, properly attuned, could pick up a cat sneezing half a million kilometers away, but that didn't make it any less true. If the Enterprise didn't know where to look...if even he had no idea where he was...

The more he thought about it, the more he realized that this system might as well be the size of the galaxy for the time it would take for someone to track him down. He'd be long dead by the time they found him, if they ever found him at all.

His macabre thoughts weren't at all helped when moved a few meters more and the lights were flickering, casting ominous shadows everywhere, and making him look around half-expecting a monster to jump out at him. But there were no monsters, only shadows.

He should be getting close now to the--

"No!"

He was starting at the abrupt end of the tunnel, well short of where he had expected it to end, and not connected to the central body. It looked like a piece of metal had been welded across the corridor, probably a damage repair.

Riker went over it carefully, but it was exactly as it appeared, just a piece of solid metal welded across the corridor. Even if he had a way to get through it, odds were there was vacuum on the other side of it.

He doubled back, turning almost like he was swimming laps, and using the rungs on what he had arbitrarily labeled the top of the corridor to head back the way he had come. He'd been so intent on getting to the core of the ship that he hadn't been paying very close attention to the features of the space. Maybe there was something he'd missed.

He'd gone a few meters when everything started spinning. At first, he thought it was the ship, but it wasn't. His ears were ringing loudly, and the tunnel seemed to flip end over end. He squeezed his eyes shut until the sensation passed. When the ringing faded away, he opened his eyes. He started to move again, only for his stomach to start to rebel again. He gagged twice, but managed to keep it under control this time.

Reaching back, he touched his head again, and wondered just how bad it was. He was still thinking straight--at least, he thought he was--but they had hammered it into them at the Academy that head wounds could fool you, and were always to be treated as life-threatening until a doctor told you otherwise. If he was bleeding into his brain, it would just continue to get worse. Putting that thought into the little box as well, he started again down the tunnel, looking around for either another control panel where he could access the schematic again, or another way out. There was a control panel, but it was completely busted--screen cracked and electronics showing signs of scorch marks.

The sound of sewage slurry being pumped into the cargo container, a sound that he had almost stopped being aware of, suddenly cut out. Instinctually, he grabbed onto the rungs at the bottom of the tunnel and pulled himself down, suspecting that something was about to happen, and not in the mood to get knocked around again. 

He was right. This time it _was_ the ship that was spinning. He next thirty seconds reminded him of those old stories about going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The ship moved in jerky starts and stops, rolled him, spun around, rolled him again. There was a brief pause, but before he could catch his breath the ship started accelerating. There was no way to know exactly how many g forces he was pulling, but he was pressed down against the wall, hand holds digging painfully into his stomach, his knees, and his already bruised shins. He tucked his head against his hands.

After a few seconds, he figured he had to be pulling at least six or seven gs. A few seconds after that and it was getting hard to breathe. Already the yellow of the lights was going gray. If this kept up, he was going to lose consciousness, and then die.

The sensation of death close at hand was a funny one. You never quite got used to it, but at the same time it could become oddly familiar. He'd experienced it often enough, but the _Pegasus_ had been the first time he'd actually felt death breathe down the back of his neck.

*

"How are you holding up, Ensign?" Pressman asked.

Ensign Riker, sitting ramrod straight on the couch in the Captain's temporary office on Starbase 35, swallowed and said frankly, "Freaked out, sir."

_Mutiny._ It just didn't happen, not in Starfleet. _How could they?_ And then, on the heels of that thought, _You lied to the JAG. How could you?_

He swallowed. He had followed the Captain's orders. That was the important thing.

"Understandable," Pressman said. "I want you to know that you did really well back there. It's a shame this entire thing is going to end up classified. I wish your bravery could be a matter of the public record."

"Yes, sir," Riker said. He reached for the cup of coffee that Pressman had offered him when he'd walked in. It was bitter and chalky on his tongue. "Sir?"

"Hmm?"

"We studied the Treaty of Algeron at the Academy. The Federation concession on cloaking technology was the linchpin of that treaty. Almost everyone agrees that if we hadn't done it, we would have ended up in another war with the Romulans. Millions of people would have died on both sides. Maybe billions."

Pressman gave him a cold stare. "Is that so?"

Riker took another swallow of coffee that he didn't even want and managed a weak, "Yes, sir."

Pressman shook his head. "Don't confuse academic theory for the real world, Ensign." He got up and walked to the window. "Sometimes, out here, you have to make the hard choices." He turned back to Riker. "Too many people in the Federation are desperate to preserve the peace at all costs. Concession after concession after concession, and where does it end? With the other powers in the quadrant growing more and more powerful while we sit back and watch."

Riker wasn't exactly sure that was true. The ban on cloaking technology aside, Federation weapons technology was as good or better than the other Alpha Quadrant powers. And cloaks were more suited to warships than vessels of exploration. Not just philosophically, but technically. It was a lot harder to mask the power curve of a mixed-purpose vessel than that of a gunship. It wasn't that cloaking technology wouldn't have been useful, and the phased cloak would have been a huge leap forward if it had worked, but Riker didn't think that the lack of cloaking technology put the Federation at such a disadvantage that it was worth risking a vital treaty over it.

But Pressman didn't care about some ensign's thoughts on interstellar politics and the balance of powers, so Riker stayed silent.

"Do you want to go home for a little while?" Pressman asked. "I can arrange for you to take some time."

"Home, sir?"

"You're from Earth, aren't you?"

"Yes, but that's a long way from here, and I don't have any particular reason to go there."

Pressman shrugged. "I've been making some inquiries. I'm not going to get another ship for a while, but I want to make sure that all of my _loyal_ officers are rewarded." 

For some reason that made Riker's stomach twist.

Pressman continued, "I have some feelers out on your behalf, but in the meantime, you're going to be sent to Betazed. You'll be working in the liaison office between Starfleet and the planetary government. They have some sort of aristocracy there that needs to be coddled. High Houses? I don't know. You'll get the details when you get there. It's less than you deserve for all that you've done, but keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and I'll make sure you're back on a ship within a year."

Riker stood, sensing the conversation was over. "Thank you sir."

Pressman offered his hand. "No, thank you, Ensign."

*

The acceleration stopped as abruptly as it had started. He gulped in a breath. He wanted to take just thirty seconds to rest, or maybe to sob like a baby, but he had no idea what was coming next, and he had to keep going.

He saw the hatch out of the corner of his eye. It was tucked back on the side of the corridor, not well-lit, but definitely a door of some kind. The handle was like the one on the door that went to the cargo container, a rod that needed to be turned, and it was just as jammed as the other one had been. He wasn't a weak man, but straining with all his might, it moved slowly. When it finally came loose, the door swung open to reveal what looked like some sort of chute. There was no light. He stared at it, contemplating options bad and worse.

After a full minute of trying to come up with a better idea, he realized he had no choice. At least the chute went somewhere, but the thought of leaving the dimly-lit corridor for another pitch-black space, this one cramped and with walls so thin that they flexed when he tapped them...

"When you get back to the _Enterprise_ , you can wash out your mouth, shower for six hours, and have a nice long conversation with Deanna about your new and exciting claustrophobia. But you have to get there first."

So he went. Feet-first, because most of the acceleration had been in that direction and if it picked up again, he'd rather not land on his head.

It was tight. Either it was meant for a smaller species, or more likely it had never been meant for people at all. His shoulders brushed against the sides as he went, and it was dark, and the smell of everything that was staining his uniform was overpowering in the tiny space, even mouth-breathing and with the broken nose dulling his sense of smell. Then the chute narrowed abruptly, and his shoulders stuck.

_I'm going to die here,_ he thought, and then his training kicked in and he heard himself say, "This is a stupid way to die, and after everything I've survived, I refuse to go out stuck in a tube covered in puke and sewage." 

But people died stupid deaths all the time, didn't they?

Tasha. Her death had been stupid, unfair, and pointless, but that didn't make her any less dead. She'd been a survivor too, right up until the day she died.

He forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. His arms were stretched up above him. He clasped his hands and squeezed his shoulders together as far as they would go. The pain in his ribs got so bad that he wanted to cry. He managed to get his boots against the side of the tube, and little by little to walk himself down, shifting his upper body from side to side, slowly working his way through the tight space.

_I wonder if this is what being born feels like._

He really was starting to lose it.

The pain was settling in now, no longer just sharp, but also deep. It was worst in his nose, which was still bleeding. He couldn't wipe away the blood, cramped as he was, so it saturated his mustache and dripped down over his lips. His head ached. His shins hurt so badly he was pretty sure he'd managed to fracture the bones when they'd slammed against the ladder.

The walls of the tunnel moved with him. There were plenty of Starfleet materials that were flexible and also next to impossible to puncture with anything short of a phaser, but he doubted very much this was one of them. He wondered if one wrong move was going to punch a hole in the tube and if it did, what would happen. He hadn't been able to study the map of the ship, and for all he knew there was space just outside. Was there was any sort of shielding in the material or was he was getting the full cosmic radiation experience? 

Those two thoughts went in the box. The box of thoughts he wasn't thinking was getting awfully full.

He moved slowly through the last few meters of the chute, emerging into a room with the same dim, yellow lighting as the corridor above. The ship must have been traveling at a constant velocity, because there was no thrust to create any g-forces. Hopefully that would last for a while. As hard as it was to work in zero-g, it was far better than working in constantly changing acceleration with no idea what the next delta-v was going to be.

Riker rubbed at his beard. His hand came away flecked with blood and vomit. He didn't usually envy the energy creatures of the universe, but corporeal bodies and all of their associated fluids were proving to be a real challenge today.

The room he was in looked like it had once been a ship's galley. There were marks on the walls where cabinets had once been, bolts on the floor that had once held down a table and chairs. He was almost certain now that there was no crew here. This ship was old, stripped down to its bones, and fully automated. He searched around, looking for anything that might prove useful, but whoever had gutted the ship had done a thorough job, at least in the galley.

In the hall, only one light was functional, and it was flickering, casting long shadows. It buzzed faintly, adding to the ghost ship ambiance.

The heat was starting to get to him. It was funny how people always thought space was cold. Space itself was cold, around 3 Kelvin in the void of interstellar space, but inside a spaceship heat was almost always the bigger problem. With no convection or conduction to carry the heat away, all that was left was radiation, and that took a while to carry away the heat of electronics and mammalian bodies. Not to mention, if the ship was close enough to the star, it would be absorbing more thermal radiation than it was putting off, and he didn't know where in the system he was relative to its sun. They would have to have some way of cooling the electronics, but whether that system was going to keep him cool...

He added death by heat stroke to the long list of deaths that he was potentially going to die in the next day or so.

Riker sighed and wiped at his forehead. He'd left his urine-soaked tunic in the cargo container, of course, and was already down to a sleeveless black undershirt. He tended to run warm, and rarely wore anything more than an undershirt beneath his uniform, even on the relatively cool bridge of the _Enterprise_.

He went to rub at his eyes, stopping himself just in time when he realized that the last thing he wanted was whatever was all over his hands in his eyes. He wanted to stop, rest, let himself float for a while. He wanted a nap, which was worrisome.

_Just ten minutes,_ he thought. _Close my eyes and rest._

"Come on, Riker. Think about the shower waiting for you at home."

_Just ten minutes._

"Let's go, Commander!" he shouted in his best XO-voice. The words echoed back at him. The guy saying them sounded like a real jackass, but they did the trick and got him moving again.

He spotted a computer panel and moved over to it. The animated face appeared again.

"Please enjoy this ad before we take you to your home screen."

At least his jury-rigged translation matrix had spread through the entire ship. Riker snorted, and then cried out in pain. Heaven help him if he had to sneeze.

"The people of the first order would like to take this opportunity to remind you that true freedom is the result of keeping to your place and never seeking to go beyond it. The people of the first order have your best interests at heart. When you increase their prosperity, you increase your own."

"Oh, _please_ ," Riker said, flipping the screen off with one of the three dozen or so obscene gestures that he'd picked up in his career.

"Tired of the ads? Renew your subscription today."

Finally the home screen appeared. He still couldn't access the comms, but he was able to get into the schematic. The tunnel he had come down was not reflected in the computer, which made him think it was a later addition, which made him worry that he couldn't be sure what he was seeing was currently accurate, but it gave him a general idea of the ship, and how to get into the main control room.

There was a supply closet just a little way down the hall. Probably it had been stripped clean, but it was worth a try.

The door was stuck half-open, and he had to squeeze to get in, but it was worth it. There were a few odds and ends that had been forgotten about. He found a wrist flashlight that worked, and quickly put it on. There was no water, no food. He hadn't expected any, but he was becoming desperately thirsty. All of the exertion and sweating wasn't helping. A toolbox contained rusty wrenches and screw drivers and what looked like old computer data chips. In zero-g, they threatened to float away, so he quickly shut the lid.

He pulled open a chest and found a spacesuit that looked intact.

Another wave of dizziness hit him. He spied what he was pretty sure were space-sickness bags, and grabbed one just in time. The mess was contained this time, but puking in zero-g still sucked, and puking in zero-g with a cracked ribs was absolute misery, especially when there was nothing left and he was dry heaving with nothing even to brace himself against.

When it was over, he sealed up the space-sickness bag, and managed to pull himself back out into the hall. He coughed, gasped, and let out a choked sob. His head was pounding now, and the pain in his nose had taken over his entire face. His stomach hurt from heaving, and his broken ribs made every breath agony.

He kept his breathing shallow and let the pain wash over him, not fighting it, just accepting, until he could gather up the strength to start going again.

_I want Deanna,_ he thought. Not that he actually wanted her with him in this nightmare place, but hurting and tired and scared, he wanted her to hold his hand, and tell him it would be okay. 

Deanna made everything better. Why had he ever let her go?

*

Deanna's hair was so soft. It was perfect. Everything about her was perfect. After almost two years, the new relationship high probably should have worn off, but he'd never been in a serious relationship before, so what did he know? Her hair was perfect and her lips were perfect and the way she chewed on her thumbnail when she was studying was perfect.

"I love you," Will said.

Deanna sat up and kissed him, long and gentle. "I love you too," she said, and Will took her chin in his hand and stared into her dark eyes.

Deanna looked away first. "Careful," she said. "You keep looking at me like that and I'm not going to be able to control myself."

"Control is overrated," Will said.

"Says the man who goes running every morning before dawn even when it's negative ten outside?"

He laughed. "You should come with me sometime. It's invigorating!"

"Ugh."

He laughed again. The sky was overcast. There was snow forecast for the next day, but right then it was warm enough to sit outside on the ground and enjoy the last of the autumn warmth. Not that they split the year into four seasons the way they did on Earth, but he still thought of the months before the snow came as autumn.

Deanna pulled her hair back into a messy ponytail. "I'm hungry," she said.

Will stood up, offering his hand to help her to her feet. She was dressed very casually, compared to her usual outfits, with bright blue tights under an over-sized black sweater, ankle boots, and a gray scarf. She hadn't bothered with makeup, or jewelry. He liked it. It was a good look for her.

But he thought everything was a good look for her, so maybe he was a little biased.

Deanna lived in a small apartment in a mid-sized city clear on the other side of the planet from where Will was stationed. The layout reminded him a little of his first apartment, the one he'd gotten after his dad had left, but the similarities ended there. Will had never managed to infuse that space with any sort of personality. Deanna's personality was writ large all over her home, in the colors, in the art on the walls, in all the little details.

They had never even talked about living together. It wasn't practical. Will lived in Starfleet quarters in Betazed's capital city, walking distance from work. Commuting there and back every day by shuttle would take almost two hours one-way, and he didn't have the clout to talk Starfleet into arranging for a daily transport. Besides, they were both busy. Deanna had her studies, Will had his work. Their time together had to be carved out in the spaces between two very full schedules. Maybe that was why, almost two years in, he still got butterflies every time he saw her.

Will made lunch, grilled cheese and tomato soup. He checked his messages while they ate, and felt a pang when he saw that his latest application to shipboard duty had been rejected.

He was doing what Pressman had said, keeping his head down and doing the best he could at every assignment that came his way, but so far nothing had come of it. Part of him wanted to get in touch with Pressman and demand to know why he was still stuck planet-side, but a larger part of him was increasingly uncomfortable with everything that had gone down with on the _Pegasus_. He was no longer sure about the choices he'd made, especially about lying to the Judge Advocate General who had investigated the incident.

No, the last thing he wanted to do was get in deeper with Pressman. That sleeping dog should be left alone.

Besides, ship duty meant leaving Deanna, and he couldn't think about that without a pain in his chest.

But the idea of never serving aboard a ship again hurt even more.

Deanna gave him a searching look. "You're feeling very conflicted about something. Do you want to talk about it?"

"My application to the _Sehlat_ got rejected," Will said, and got up to clear the table.

"Oh," Deanna said quietly.

He couldn't read her emotions like she could read his, not unless she chose to share them with him, and she was good at locking herself down when she wanted to, but he was pretty sure there was relief on her face. They'd had the conversation a few times before. Deanna knew that he would accept any shipboard offer that came his way, and Will knew that Deanna wished that he would decide to settle down on Betazed and stay with her, at least until she finished her post-doctoral work, and was ready to take on a Starfleet assignment. The conflict between his career ambitions and their relationship had become an elephant in the room, and it wasn't going away.

Deanna had work to finish, so Will sat on her couch reading an article in one of the music magazines about jazz on 23rd century Mars. The sun was going down outside, casting long shadows through the picture windows. It was quiet and domestic. Nice.

His commbadge chimed. He was off duty, wearing civilian clothes, and he had to dig it out of his pocket before he could respond. When he did, they asked for his location, and routed a comm signal to Deanna's computer. Commander Frang, the Edosian who was Riker's CO's CO, appeared. Riker sat up straighter, and hoped he didn't have any food stuck in his teeth.

"Sir?"

"Lieutenant Riker," Frang said. "The _Potemkin's_ operations officer had a family emergency last week and went home. She's taking an extended leave from Starfleet, and the captain doesn't think she has anyone on board qualified to take over. Your name has been floated as a possible replacement. Interested?"

"Absolutely, sir!"

Frang made a gesture with all three of his arms that Riker couldn't quite read. "The _Potemkin_ is on her way to the Turkana system. She'll alter course to swing by Betazed and pick you up, but you need to be ready to go in nineteen hours. Can you do that?"

"I could be ready in nineteen minutes, sir," Riker said.

Frang made a noise that Riker thought was probably a laugh. "Nineteen hours will be fine. Report to transporter room 3 in the annex tomorrow morning at 0330 hours. Frang out."

He could feel Deanna standing behind him and he turned slowly to look at her. "Deanna I'm--"

"No," she said. "Don't apologize. You told me from the beginning that you would take any shipboard assignment that came your way without hesitation and you've never wavered from that. I've known all along that I would lose you to a ship one day."

He stood up and wrapped his arms around her. "You haven't lost me. We can still make this work. Listen, first chance I get, I'll take leave. We'll go on vacation together to Risa. How does that sound?"

She stepped back away from him. There was a sheen of tears in her eyes, but she smiled all the same. "Sounds good."

He kissed her. "Let's go to dinner tonight. Somewhere nice."

"Don't you have to get ready to go?"

He laughed. "Not really. I've been ready for two years." He wished the words back almost immediately, as soon as he saw the hurt in her eyes. It was true enough, but it was the kind of truth that was better left unsaid. "That's nothing to do with you."

"I know." She gave him a sad smile. "But I can't help wishing that Betazed had become your home, just as it is mine."

"It has. It is."

He was lying, and they both knew it.

*

The control room was just around the corner. The lights were off, but he had the flashlight. He got into one of the chairs, pulling a strap over his legs to keep himself seated. The comms came up. They had been showing as offline earlier, but the idiotic subscription-based computer system hadn't been willing to tell him why.

The user interface on the computer was still awful, but he managed to figure his way into the comms diagnostic screen. The problem seemed to be the antenna itself, but when he tried to pull external video feed, the animated face popped up.

"Cameras are not included in the free version of this program. Please enjoy this ad before we return you to your home screen."

Riker laughed. "Okay. You know what, you--" He made a Klingon gesture at the screen, one that meant, roughly, 'die screaming and without honor', and reset the computer.

Once he was back in the Vulcan root OS, things went faster. "Can you take over this ship?" Riker muttered. It could. Probably. But if he wiped the overlaid OS, he had no way to know how long it might take, or even if the Vulcan OS would figure out how to capture all of the systems. And once he wiped the overlaid OS, if it didn't work, he would have nothing to use to interface with the ship.

He pulled back, went into the overlaid OS, sat through the ad (this one for some sort of nutritional bar), and started poking around. Maybe there was another way...

But navigation wasn't even an option. As far as he could tell, the thrusters and the drive were directly controlled by another system entirely, probably some sort of automated flight plan set back at the station.

If he wiped the overlaid OS, the ship would continue on its way. Only he would lose...lights, what remained of life support, and...that was about it. With the CO2 scrubbers working at 10% efficiency, he was probably going to suffocate eventually anyway, although at this rate the dehydration would probably get him first. He rubbed his hands together nervously, got back into the root OS, and typed the command to wipe the overlay.

ARE YOU CERTAIN?

"No," Riker said, but he typed yes, and everything went dark.

He briefly amused himself imagining the animated figure dying in a fire, and then he waited. With nothing else to focus on, the pain from all of the damage he'd taken over the last few hours became almost unbearable. He balled his hand into a fist and focused on his breathing. He thought about home. He thought about Tuesday night poker and practicing his trombone and Deanna and Worf and Data and all of his friends. His family. If he made it out of this, he was going to hug them all. Even Worf. Even Captain Picard.

Maybe not Captain Picard.

A soft beep pulled him out of thoughts.

134 CONNECTED DEVICES DETECTED. ATTEMPT TO TAKE CONTROL?

"Yes, please," Riker said, and settled down to wait again.

ALL CONNECTED DEVICES UNDER COMPUTER CONTROL.

"Thank you," Riker said to whatever probably long-dead computer technician had set the system up all those years ago.

He ran a diagnostic on the antenna. Power was getting to it, but the computer couldn't send it any messages to transmit.

He pulled the cameras up. Most of them were out, but he was fortunate, and the one focused on the antenna wasn't. He zoomed in. The picture became fuzzy, but it was enough to see that there was a cable sliced clean through.

He could fix it. There was the spacesuit. He could go out there and...

And what? Based on the tech he had seen all over the ship, that was almost certainly fiber optic cable. You didn't just reconnect that, it took specialized tools to splice it back together. Tools he didn't have. And if he couldn't reconnect that cable, if he couldn't get comms...

No navigational control. No comms. No water. No food. Not enough oxygen. The only question was what he would die of first, dehydration or hypoxia.

Maybe the Enterprise would find him in time. If they didn't...

Would they even find his body? How long would they look? A while. Longer than Starfleet would like. Picard would call in favors and pull strings, but eventually Starfleet would order them away. Send an investigative team to follow up, but after a while even that would be called off. And his body would be here, going back and forth through the system as the ship went about its business. There was oxygen, so he would decompose. What would that be like? There were no insects, and it would take a while, but flesh would rot and eventually he would be...what? Just bones?

And whatever was left of him would go back and forth. A hundred times? A thousand? More? Maybe the ship would eventually be scuttled and the person assigned to take it apart for scrap would find his remains and be very confused. Maybe they would just leave it floating like so much space junk until one day it fell into the sun.

Picard would get a new first officer. Hopefully it would be Data. By all rights, it should be Data.

Deanna would cry.

Would his dad cry?

Would he see his mom?

There would be a memorial service, and it would be harder than usual because there would be no body. No closure.

"No."

He wasn't giving up, no matter how much it hurt and no matter how tired he was. He wasn't doing that to them. 

He pulled the specs of the antenna. The severed cable was indeed a fiber optic line that carried the data to be transmitted, and there was no fixing it. But if he recorded a message on a computer chip, he could plug it right into the antenna and transmit. Light speed radio, on a frequency that maybe no one was even monitoring, but it was a chance.

He made his way back to the supply closet. The spacesuit was old, bulky, and on closer inspection the helmet had a hairline crack. He drug it back to the central control room, where the light was better and there was more room, along with the toolbox.

The first four data chips he plugged into the computer came up corrupt, but the fifth worked.

READY TO RECORD

"This is Commander William Riker of the Federation Starship _Enterprise_ to anyone who can hear me. I'm stranded, alone, on a sewage transport ship. I don't know where I'm going or what my vector is, but this ship does not have warp power, so I don't believe I've left the Endicor system. If you get this, I need help, and medical attention." He paused, licked his lips, ignoring the taste of blood, and continued, "If I'm found too late, I want my friends on the _Enterprise_ to know that I love them, and that it has been an honor serving with them."

He turned off the recording, tucked the chip into the concealed pocket near his waistband, and turned back to the rest of his project.

He wanted to sleep. It was the head injury, the pain, the dehydration. It was all of it. He turned back to the computer, searching for any music files. Audio files were small, and Vulcans liked music, so a library of it came pre-loaded with their OS. It seemed silly to waste time looking for music at a time like this, but he needed something to keep him focused and awake. There was no jazz, but there was some _ava-thirin_ , a fast-paced Andorian music that he kind of liked. He put it on. He had no idea what the song was about, but the beat was good. Fast. He played it as loud as he could without making his headache unbearable, which wasn't very loud.

The spacesuit was made for someone shorter than him, but it was baggy enough that it would work. Oxygen was stored in an external air tank that fitted into a backpack of sorts. He checked the read out, but it was a mechanical dial, and he had no idea what the symbols meant. There was definitely some oxygen, but if he had five minutes or fifty, he had no idea.

"Going to need to work fast," he muttered.

The hairline crack in the helmet was a problem. Especially since he was going out with an unknown amount of oxygen, he couldn't afford to lose any. He dug through the toolbox, looking for anything that might seal the crack. He found a tube of sealant, but it was too thick to spread. Experimentally, he put a small amount in his hand and spat into it, not that he had much spit left. It turned into a sticky paste that he could run over the crack in the helmet.

"One day you're sitting in the command chair of the flagship of the Federation, the next you're going EVA in a suit literally held together with spit," he said, and set the helmet aside to dry.

Life was full of unexpected vector changes.

*

The _Drake_ had Pressman written all over it.

He was almost positive that he'd gotten the posting on the _Potemkin_ entirely on his own merits. The first officer posting on the _Hood_ he was less sanguine about, but he gave himself even odds of having caught the eye of Captain DeSoto versus Pressman pulling a string or two for him. It could easily have been both. 

But the _Drake_ was all Pressman. He didn't know how he knew, but he felt it in his bones.

Increasingly, nothing to do with the _Pegasus_ felt right, not the experiment, not shooting at his fellow officers for disobeying an illegal order (and he could no longer convince himself that the phaser had been on stun, because the truth was that in the madness of it all, he hadn't even thought to check), and especially not lying to the JAG.

He wanted to be a captain. He didn't want Pressman's favors.

He was lying on his bed, a glass of whiskey, the real stuff, all but forgotten on the table next to him. Manjula Ruiz's latest album was playing but he wasn't listening.

The _Hood_ was a fine ship, but he was ready to move on. He needed a new challenge.

Take the _Drake_? Become a captain at an enviably young age? He was twenty-nine. Kirk hadn't even made captain until he was thirty-two. He'd break the record, at least for Human captains. (The Hamalki didn't count. Being born with the memories of your predecessor was cheating.) If he made a success of it, he would be golden. He could have any command he wanted after something like that.

And all because he'd lied under oath.

Riker got up and paced. He'd gotten pretty good at forgetting about the _Pegasus_ entirely. Sometimes he could convince himself that he'd done the right thing. He'd followed orders. He hadn't even lied so much as kept silent when the opportunity arose to tell the truth.

_"Do you have anything to add to the official record, Ensign Riker?"_

_"No, sir."_

No, that was equivocation. He'd lied.

_"And you can offer no explanation for the actions of the crew? You have no idea why seasoned Starfleet officers with excellent service records would mutiny?"_

_"No, sir."_

_"Did Captain Pressman say or do anything that might have caused them to believe that they had no choice but to rebel against their commanding officer?"_

_"No. It was a totally routine mission. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Not that I was aware of."_

Maybe he should just come out with it. Tell the whole truth. Wasn't confession supposed to be good for the soul?

Riker laughed bitterly. Confess? The _Pegasus_ was gone. Pressman was an admiral now, sitting behind a desk at Starfleet Intelligence. The case was long closed. He would accomplish nothing except the total destruction of his own career, and after everything he'd given up for that-- _Imzadi_ \--was it really worth throwing it away now?

It wouldn't even be the right thing to do. No one would believe him. He didn't have a shred of evidence. And on the off chance something got back to the Romulans, he could start an interstellar incident over a long buried secret that should have stayed secret.

No, there was no absolution here. He didn't get to unburden himself. He went to the mirror in the bathroom and stared into it. "Coward." He had an impulse to punch the mirror dramatically, but it was transparent aluminum over platinum. He'd shatter his hand, not the mirror, and then what? Sickbay would want to know why, and "I punched the mirror in a fit of self-loathing" was just going to get him sent down to the psychologist's office.

He went back into the bedroom and took a large swallow of whiskey, then tugged on his boots and started to walk. He didn't even know where he was going. He wandered aimlessly for a while, wishing he had brought a PADD with him so that it would look like he was doing something important. It was always best to have a PADD with you, if you didn't want to be bothered. 

But it was late, and the corridors were all but empty. There was no one to bother him. Eventually he ended up in the observation lounge. It was empty, and Will took a seat in front of the largest window. The _Hood_ was docked at Starbase 35, but the observation lounge faced into deep space. He got up and touched the window. The stars stretched out in front of him, inviting and enticing. The view never got old.

"I've been looking for you." Riker dropped his hand and turned. DeSoto crossed to him. "I went by your quarters and you weren't there. Couldn't sleep?"

"I have a lot on my mind."

"The _Drake_?"

"Yes, sir."

DeSoto sat down, and rested his ankle on his knee. "There's home," he said, pointing.

"Sir?"

"You're from Earth. There's our star, right there." He smiled. "Every time I get into port I check the star charts so that I know where it is. We're close enough to actually see it with the naked eye right now. Miss it?"

"Not particularly," Riker said. He took a seat at the end of the couch. "I'm mostly just looking forward to getting back out there."

"Ah, youth," DeSoto said. He turned to Riker. "I'm surprised you didn't jump at the _Drake_ the second the opportunity arose. I figured you'd be off my ship like a shot if a captaincy ever came your way, although I wasn't expecting it to happen quite so soon."

"Me too," Riker said.

"Any particular reason you're hesitating?"

Riker crossed his legs and laced his hands behind his neck. "I'm not sure." It wasn't a lie, not entirely. He wasn't sure if it was just Pressman or something else that was holding him back.

"Can I ask you a personal question, Will?" Riker gave a sort of half-nod of reluctant permission, and DeSoto shook his head. "You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I'm just wondering what your end goal is."

"Sir?"

"You're one of the best officers I've ever served with. You've rocketed up the chain of command. You're laser-focused on your career and a complete jackass when you need to be to get things done, but somehow the majority of the crew also loves you, which is frankly astonishing to me. You seem happy enough here, but there's a certain...distance in you. A sense that you're only here until the next big chance comes along. Which is fine. Your career is your own to manage and I have no complaints at all about your performance. But I can't help wondering what it is that you want. What's the goal? Captain? Admiral? Fleet admiral? CiC?"

"Not CiC," Riker said with a laugh. "Maybe admiral, maybe someday. Mostly just captain. Exploration. Learn new things, meet new people."

"And that's all?"

Riker looked at him. "Isn't that enough?"

"Most people want something besides a career to come home to at night."

Riker grimaced. "If this is about me settling down and having kids..."

"No. Certainly not. Plenty of people are happy without children, and I'm not suggesting that you need some sort of traditional family structure to make you satisfied with your life. But you have a lot to offer. To a romantic partner, if that's what you want, or more broadly just to friends, if you ever decided to let yourself get attached to any."

"I have friends."

"You have associates."

"I'm very social."

"You network."

Riker frowned and looked away.

"I didn't mean--I just get the impression that you're a very sociable man who never lets himself get really close to anyone," DeSoto said.

_Those are my abandonment issues. They were a present from my dad,_ Riker thought. _The only person I've ever trusted not to leave me on a whim was Deanna Troi, and in the end I still chose my career over her. Just like Dad did to me._ But he wasn't about to say any of that. There weren't a lot of people who told those things to. There wasn't anyone, actually, not since Deanna. So maybe DeSoto had a point.

Riker walked back to the window. "I want to explore the universe. I want to learn as much as I can in one short Human lifetime. I want to be truly challenged."

DeSoto got up and joined him at the window. "True exploratory missions are hard to come by. Starfleet has to wear so many hats, all of them important. Most officers, most captains even, spend their time mopping up messes and ferrying people around and tracking down smugglers. It's rare that you get orders that just say, 'go here, and see what's there.'" He sighed. " _But_ those missions are out there. And some ships get more of them than others." He looked at Will. "A little birdy told me that the new _Enterprise_ needs an XO. If you want to be a captain, take the _Drake_. If you want to explore...if you really want to boldly go, as the old saying goes, consider the _Enterprise_."

*

The antenna was located on the front of the ship. The airlock was about fifteen meters away from it.

He was going to need to plug his data chip into the main access panel of the antenna, which, if the specs were correct, was covered by a steel cover plate. As a rule, things didn't rust in space, but a ship this old could have been exposed to all sorts of things, and it was possible that it was rusted shut, or otherwise stuck. With the oxygen situation as precarious as it was, he couldn't risk going out and having to come back in to get tools. He needed to figure out a way both to tether himself to the ship, and to take tools out with him.

And so, back to the supply closet, but he had exhausted the meager supplies of the closet. He needed to search the rest of the ship.

He had never been so thirsty in his life. He had been when he'd woken up, and puking himself dry hadn't helped. He was thirsty, and he was in a lot of pain, but he couldn't let that distract him or make him rush through his preparations. He was going to get exactly one shot at this, and if he screwed it up, he was dead.

Probably he was dead either way, but until he actually drew his last breath, he was going to work on the assumption that he could get out of here alive.

He went down to the engine room, but the doors were sealed, and there were big, brightly colored signs that were probably a radiation warning. The problem with radiation was that, except at extremely high doses, you didn't feel it when it first hit you, only when your insides started to melt. Without a tricorder, he couldn't know if the warning meant that levels were something that would be dangerous with long-term exposure, or if he'd be non-functional within twenty minutes of going in. Not worth the risk.

He searched the rest of the ship, making his way toward what must have been crew quarters at one time. It looked like the scrappers hadn't bothered with them, but the lockers weren't much help. A toy figurine of some sort of dancing plant, a few books, a water bottle (empty), a key, some old rags, socks...handcuffs?

Riker held them up. "I am not going to ask. I'm just glad they're here."

He tried the key in the handcuffs. It worked.

The bunks were more like sleeping bags affixed to the walls. He pulled one down. It would work for a makeshift tool bag. The bags were held in place with rope. It had a polymer coating, and a test pull revealed what felt like a decent tensile strength. He pulled it off the walls, ending up with five lengths of about three meters each.

Carrying his haul back to the control room, he set to work. He used a double-fisherman's knot--thanks for the fishing lessons, Dad--to connect the pieces of rope, and got a length of roughly fifteen meters. Separating the two cuffs from the chain that connected them proved to be a challenge, but there was a small serrated blade in the toolbox that eventually did the trick. He connected the ends of the rope to the cuffs with figure eight knots. The cuff should be just large enough to fit around his wrist, although with the spacesuit on, it was going to be a near thing.

He pulled the exterior cameras again. Once he exited the air lock, he would need to clear a space of about three meters, and then he would connect with a ladder that ran up the side of the ship, toward the antenna. It looked like there had once been more rungs, but they were gone now. A piece of one was still there, right outside the airlock. He could use it to launch himself toward the extant rungs.

If the rung broke, or if he got the trajectory wrong, he would float off into space, and asphyxiate whenever the suit ran out of air.

But if the rung held, and he got the trajectory right...then he could hook the other end of the rope to the ladder, and use it to tether himself to the ship.

He dressed. The spacesuit was indeed too short for him, and did terribly unpleasant things to his testicles, but he managed. The helmet sealed tight around the neck, but he wouldn't really know if the suit was airtight until he was in vacuum. 

Into the airlock, close the inner doors, and--

The inner doors wouldn't close.

"If I get out of this alive, I am going to buy this spaceship just so I can blow it up." He could too. Starfleet paid, if it could be said to pay at all, only a token small stipend that was uniform across the board regardless of rank, but he had a tidy little stash of latinum from hustling at the gaming tables of various seedy bars and he would be happy to empty it for the satisfaction of seeing this ship explode.

Surely Captain Picard would let him borrow the phasers for such a noble cause.

He found the manual override, but this time no amount of straining and sweating would get it to budge. It wasn't a problem with the control mechanism, the inner doors were jammed.

Riker considered his options. If he opened the outer doors without closing the inner doors first, he was going to have to deal with the decompression, which would change the vector of the ship. Which could easily blow him out into space with no control over his own vector. That was a bad option. It was hardly even an option at all.

He looked again at the inner doors. It looked like one of them had come off of bottom rail. He found a flat bar in the bag, and a rubber wedge to use as a point of leverage, and hooked it under the door that had come off. He didn't actually have any weight to use, but he could brace himself on the ceiling, and push down with his feet.

The door came up, millimeter by millimeter, and then all at once snapped back onto the track, and slammed shut so violently that Riker was glad none of his appendages had been in the way.

He put on the helmet, and decompressed the airlock. The suit seemed tight, and the oxygen meter didn't decrease noticeably in the first five seconds, so he had to assume he was going to be okay. He opened the outer door.

Holding carefully to the handle by the door, he stuck his head out into space.

The first problem, because of course there was a problem, was that the broken rung that he had seen on the camera was not nearly as long as it had looked. Bad camera angle. He looked around. There had to be some other way he could get something to brace against and get himself to the ladder rung. The ship was an ugly collection of angles. There had to be some way...

Riker laughed. "Parrises squares," he said. He had plenty of experience launching an iron mallet against an angled ramp and trying to get it to land where he wanted it. Only in this case, the mallet was going to be him, and it was going to be a three-angle move. "Impressive amount of points for that, if you can manage it."

He flexed his hands, flexed his toes, calculated the trajectory one last time, and launched.

He banged against a support beam, pushed himself off against it, hit another one with more force than he'd liked, launched again, landed on a lip jutting out of the ship near the engine room, and finally with one last push, flew at the rung.

Grabbed it, nearly lost it, scrambled against nothing, and somehow managed to pull himself in.

He laughed. "That was _amazing_."

There was still a good chance he was still going to die, but at least he was going out with style.

A wave of dizziness came and went. He dry heaved a few times and forced his eyes to stay open.

He hooked the last rung with the cuff, and made his way up toward the antenna. The bag of tools was on his back. Something started vibrating and he checked the oxygen meter. He still couldn't read it, but the alarm couldn't be a good sign.

The door to the control panel was locked. He examined it carefully, considered a few options, and then took a hammer out of his bag and hit it until the lock broke and he opened the door. Carefully, he took out the computer data chip, and slid it into the antenna, and flicked the switch to change the input.

The oxygen alarm started buzzing harder. The oxygen was going. He had to get back to the ship.

He grabbed the rope and used it to pull himself back down toward the ladder rung. Stopped. Wait, no, he could use the same track as before. Calculate the trajectory and...no, he was tethered to the ship. He couldn't do that.

How was he going to unhook himself from the ship? Key. There was a key.

His head hurt. He coughed. His heart was racing in his chest, and he was sweating.

This was bad. He grabbed for a ladder rung, missed. Trajectory was all screwed up.

Back to the ship. _Enterprise_. Data. Geordi. Worf.

Deanna.

He hit the side of the ship. His head smacked into the back of the helmet. There were a thousand pretty colored lights, and then nothing at all.

*

"25 CCs of tri-ox!"

"Will!"

"Deanna, move!"

"What's that smell?"

"Me. The smell is me."

"Give me an oxygen mask. And someone cut him out of that suit!"

"Deanna?"

"I'm here."

"He has a multiple cerebral contusions. Call ahead to sickbay. Tell them I'm going to need a large-bore inter-cranial probe."

"Oh, that sounds unpleasant."

"It would be, if you were going to be awake for it. Don't try to sit up!"

"I think I'm going to gag."

"Let's see how you smell after..."

"For goodness' sake, Will, stop trying to sit up. What did you do to your nose?"

"Delta-v."

"Uh-huh."

Someone picked him up and deposited him on a stretcher. He looked up and saw a pleasant looking man staring down at him. "You're new."

"Yes, sir." The stretcher started to move.

"Nurse?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sorry, I forgot your name."

"Samir al-Masri."

"Samir, I think I need to throw up again."

Something pressed against his chest--when had he lost his shirt?--and the nausea passed. And then something else hissed, and the world fell away again.

*

Will Riker woke up in a dark, still, silent place. But it wasn't so dark, or so still, or so silent as the last place. There was light, soft red light that reflected off of the ceiling. The bed under him was soft, the blanket was warm, the air was cool, and he could hear the faint hum of the engine, and soft voices outside the door.

Also, he didn't smell. That was a definite improvement.

He turned and saw Deanna curled up in a chair next to him, fast asleep. He smiled, although the sight also sobered him. A private room _and_ Deanna had been allowed to stay. He must have been in bad shape.

He rolled onto his side and poked her in the side. She grunted and shifted. He poked her again.

"Quit it," she mumbled.

"Deaaaaanna."

Her eyes snapped open. "Will!"

He wanted to say something teasing, but the next thing he knew had his arms full of Deanna Troi and she was crying. He pulled her into a tight hug. She shivered against him and buried her face in his neck. Just how close had he been to death?

He let himself enjoy the feeling of her in his arms. How had he managed to get so fortunate as to have Deanna Troi in his life again? Maybe she wasn't his lover anymore, but she was his friend, and that was more than enough. More than he deserved. He pulled back and looked at her. "Bad?"

"Bad," she said. "You were missing for over twenty hours, and then when we found you..." She swallowed. "You were in a coma for two days. Doctor Pulaski had to take part of your skull off to relieve the swelling in your brain."

He touched the back of his head, now clean and fully healed. "She put it back."

"I did." Pulaski was standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the main part of sickbay.

"So I'm going to live?"

"Yes," she said, giving him a smile. She pressed a button, and the lights in the room came up slowly. "Although you managed to do an impressive amount of damage to yourself."

Two drug-release patches dotted his forearm. "What's all this?"

"Hyronalin, for radiation exposure from a dirty fusion reactor, and a broad-spectrum anti-microbial, as a precaution." She ran a medical tricorder over his head. "How do you feel?"

"I have never wanted to brush my teeth more. My muscles ache, like I overused them. And I have a slight headache."

She paused. "How slight?"

"Slight, especially compared to before. I wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't asked."

"Okay. If it gets worse or lasts more than a few hours, I'll give you something, but for now, I've pumped a lot of drugs into your system. I'd like to give your body a chance to process what it's gotten so far."

"That's fine." He started to sit up, but Pulaski put a hand on his chest and adjusted the bed so that it sat him up instead.

Deanna replicated him a glass of water, and he used it to rinse his mouth out. Grimacing, she took the dirty cup away and brought him a fresh one. He drank greedily. They must have rehydrated him already, but the water on his throat was bliss.

"You need rest," Pulaski said.

"I need a shower and a dental hygeine unit."

"We cleaned you up. You need rest more."

"Respectfully, I disagree."

"Commander..."

Deanna came to his rescue. "Let him shower and clean his teeth," she said. "He might be clean, but he doesn't feel clean. The act of showering will put him at ease and he'll rest better."

In the end, Will got his dental hygeine unit and his shower, although only with the concession of a nurse standing a meter to his left, just in case he fell over in the middle of it. He opted for a water shower, and let the water fall over him, hot as he could stand it. The nurse, Samir, turned to him after about twenty minutes and asked with forced patience, "Almost done, sir?"

Riker looked at him. "You spend hours covered in vomit and blood and sewage and let me how long you want to stay in the shower."

Samir didn't have an answer for that, and Will stayed in until his fingers and toes had wrinkled and he almost felt clean again.

He slept for almost ten hours after that, and then Pulaski ran some tests and decided he could be sent back to his quarters, although not before she made it very clear that he wasn't allowed to even think about going back on duty for another seventy-two hours.

Deanna walked him to his room. He was wearing civilian clothes that he had replicated before leaving sickbay, but he was still a little pale, and the story had probably made it around the ship already. He got a look of concern with all of the usual nods and "sir"s.

When they got there, he opened the door and looked at Deanna. "Come in for a little bit?"

"I can't right now, I'm sorry. I can come back in a few hours." She gave him another hug before she went.

In his quarters, he put on a jazz album and ordered himself a large glass of cold water. He was half-lost in the music when the door chimed. He paused the recording, and called for whoever it was to come in.

Captain Picard stood at his door. Will started to get up, but the Captain waved him back down.

"I meant to come see you in sickbay, but I've been tied up on the bridge all morning and when I finally went down there, I was told you'd already been released."

"I understand, sir."

Picard gestured to a chair and Will quickly nodded. He sighed. "We scoured the system for you, but we didn't know where to even begin looking. If we hadn't gotten your message, I doubt we would have found you in time."

"I thought as much when I was on that ship. It was a very...motivating thought."

Picard smiled. "I'm sure it was. Will, what happened over there?"

As quickly as possible, Riker summarized the events. When he got to the end of it, Picard leaned back in his chair and nodded. "That's impressive. All of it. Good work."

"Thank you sir." He sighed. "Do you by any chance know how I ended up on that ship in the first place? I seem to have lost a chunk of time before I was attacked, and Pulaski says I'm unlikely to get it back."

Picard nodded. "We do. Our investigation managed to uncover almost the entire chain of events. You were mugged. They used a stun devise on you. On an Endicoran an it produces only a temporary daze, but your Human physiology reacted differently. You lost consciousness entirely, and fell back and hit your head. Your attackers saw the blood, assumed you were dead, panicked, and tossed you into a nearby shuttle in an attempt to hide the body. The shuttle operator discovered you, but only once she was in space. She also assumed you were dead, also panicked, and disposed of your, ah, body as quickly as she could."

"In a sewage transport. Good place to hide a body, I guess," Riker said. "None of these people ever heard of checking for a pulse?"

Picard just shook his head and stood. "I'm very glad you're back," he said. "Get some sleep. I'm sure you need it."

He was tired of sleeping, though, and laid on the couch reading and enjoying the sensation of being cool, hydrated, and not in pain.

The door chimed again.

"Enter!"

"Good afternoon, Commander," Data said. "Am I interrupting?"

"No, not at all." He sat up. Data's arms were full of boxes.

Data stepped inside and the doors shut behind him. "Councilor Troi suggested that given your extroverted nature and natural love of activity, you might be going 'stir-crazy' during your recovery."

"I am, a little bit. What's all that?"

"Games. I brought a wide variety. Kal-toh?"

Riker shook his head. "Not my game. I can barely manage it when I'm not recovering from a concussion."

"Checkers?"

"Too easy even with a concussion."

"Kadis-kot?"

"Mm, okay." Riker got up from the couch and walked over to the table, watching Data as he set up the game.

"Commander, may I ask you a question?" Data asked as he set up the game.

"Of course."

"In your message, you said that you loved your friends. Was I included in that sentiment?"

Riker was surprised by the question, but he didn't have to think about the answer. "Absolutely. You're my friend and I love you."

"Thank you, sir. I am sorry I cannot reciprocate."

Will got up and walked to the replicator. He ordered pancakes with fruit and coffee. He was on medical leave. Breakfast for dinner felt fitting.

He set the food down and sat back across from Data. "Are you sure you don't?"

Data looked up, although he never stopped setting up the game. "Sir?"

"I know you don't feel love, but..." He rubbed his chin. "You show it."

"Do I? How?"

"By...things like this. Why did you come here to play games with me? Aren't there other things you would rather being doing?"

Data inclined his head. "No, sir. This is the best use of my time."

"Why?"

"Because it is good to render assistance to someone in need."

"But I'm not in need, I'm bored. Don't get me wrong, Data, I appreciate that you're here, but...other people on the Enterprise are probably bored too. What makes me special?"

"You were recently injured. And you are my friend."

Riker took a long swallow of coffee. "Look, all I know is that whatever you may or may not feel...when you single me out to do kind things for me...that feels, to me, like love. It makes me feel loved." 

"I see." Data looked contemplative.

The game was set up, but before they could play, before Will had even made it half-way through his pancakes, the door chimed again, and Deanna entered.

She smiled. "Hello Data. How's it going?"

"Very well. Commander Riker loves me, and I make him feel loved."

Deanna's hand flew to her mouth, and she choked back a laugh. "I'm...that's wonderful."

"Have I said something humorous?"

"Not exactly," she said. "It was more in your delivery."

Data's eyes went back and forth. He shook his head. "Humor continues to elude me."

She crossed to Will and put her hand on his shoulder. "How are you feeling?"

"Good." He rested his hand on top of hers and looked up at her. "I'm home."

end


End file.
